The Choke Artist

In this hilarious collection of essays, David Yoo exposes the pain--and the absurdities--of coming of age when you're awkward, insecure, and unable to stop shooting yourself in the foot.
In often cringe-inducing episodes, David Yoo perfectly captures the cycle of failure and fear from childhood through adulthood with brutal honesty Whether he's wearing four layers of clothing to artificially beef up his slim frame, routinely testing highlighters against his forearm to see if he indeed has yellow skin, or preemptively sabotaging promising relationships to avoid being compared to former boyfriends, Yoo celebrates and skewers the insecurities of anxious people everywhere.

David Yoo is the author of two YA novels, Girls for Breakfast (Delacorte, 2005) and Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before (Hyperion, 2008). They have received numerous awards including NYPL Best Book Teen Age Selection and Chicago Public Library's "Best of the Best". His fiction and nonfiction have been published in various journals and he writes a monthly column called "The World According to Dave," for KoreAm Journal, the largest Asian American magazine in the U.S.